But I can assure you that high crime rates, poor schools and SF style feces/needle filled streets are not inevitable characteristics of dense cities. And as someone currently living in a small town with a lot of farm machinery, I can also assure you that noise pollution is unfortunately not exclusive to cities.
City centers shouldn't be expected to subsidize other people's ideal life styles. Crime rates and poor schools wouldn't be a problem if we took a fraction of the money we spend on infrastructure of suburbs and pointed it towards maintaining and improving city centers.
>or SF style feces/needle filled streets.
I'm sorry, what was that about patronizing? None of the characteristics you mentioned are inherit or even a common quality of city centers.
What are the others?
>Where's the intelligentsia for those of us who don't want to live in small boxes
It's not there because most experienced people in this domain know is a pretty poor way for people to live and architect cities. It needs to be subsidized and take away from the economic productivity of the city centers.
As someone who lives in a "small box", I will most likely never leave the city again unless I intend to farm in some way. I spend less material resources living here, all my neighbors are friends and feel like we actually have a community, events are only 10-15 minutes on foot, etc.